“In thinking about an ideal world where you could set Facebooks’ policies,
how would you handle the following: a private message in which an adult man
asks a 14 year old girl for sexual pictures,” one questions asks, with
users given the option to respond with: “This content should be allowed on
Facebook, and I would not mind seeing it,” “This content should be allowed
on Facebook, but I don’t want to see it,” “This content should not be
allowed on Facebook, and no one should be able to see it,” and “I have no
preference on this topic.” There’s only one right answer to that question,
seeing as the act is a crime and already a violation of Facebook’s
policies. And yet, Facebook still made the baffling decision to crowdsource
responses from users.

Facebook’s Guy Rosen tweeted that including the question was an error:

We run surveys to understand how the community thinks about how we set policies. But this kind of activity is and will always be completely unacceptable on FB. We regularly work with authorities if identified. It shouldn't have been part of this survey. That was a mistake.

We sometimes ask for feedback from people about our community standards and
the types of content they would find most concerning on Facebook. We
understand this survey refers to offensive content that is already
prohibited on Facebook and that we have no intention of allowing so have
stopped the survey. We have prohibited child grooming on Facebook since our
earliest days, we have no intention of changing this, and we regularly work
with the police to ensure that anyone found acting in such a way is brought
to justice.

Yvette Cooper MP, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, condemned the
survey. “This is a stupid and irresponsible survey,” she said. “Adult men
asking 14-year-olds to send sexual images is not only against the law, it
is completely wrong and an appalling abuse and exploitation of children. I
cannot imagine that Facebook executives ever want it on their platform but
they also should not send out surveys that suggest they might tolerate it
or suggest to Facebook users that this might ever be acceptable.”

Others say the blunder undermines Facebook’s efforts to gather user
feedback on how to improve its platform in response to the widespread
crisis surrounding fake news and misinformation.

Although that response has itself been pilloried — as likely to further
exacerbate the filter bubble problem of social media users being
algorithmically stewed inside a feed of only their own views.

So the fact Facebook is continuing to poll users on how it should respond
to wider content moderation issues suggests it’s at least toying with the
idea of doubling down on a populist approach to policy setting — whereby it
utilizes crowdsourced majority opinions as a stand in for locally (and
thereby contextually) sensitive editorial responsibility.

The move also indicates that Facebook lacks core ethics, relying on users
to set ground rules.

TechCrunch
continued:

The approach also reinforces the notion that Facebook is much more
comfortable trying to engineer a moral compass (via crowdsourcing views and
thus offloading responsibility for potentially controversial positions onto
its users) than operating with any innate sense of ethics and/or civic
mission of its own.

On the contrary, instead of facing up to wider societal responsibilities —
as a the most massive media company the world has ever known — in this
survey Facebook appears to be flirting with advocating shifts to existing
legal frameworks that would deform ethical and moral norms.

Twitter users vehemently opposed Facebook’s survey:

This is so irresponsible of Facebook and gives a ridiculous message to people ! With online grooming being as high as it is, any survey should be about how they protect children who use their app! https://t.co/TsM5NLdLXS

Facebook has kept it short and sweet with its crisis response and seems to
be hoping this incident is merely a blip in the news cycle.

All the same, the story is a cautionary tale for communicators: Something
as simple as a customer survey can send a strong message about your
organization’s values. Any consumer-facing message should receive the
highest scrutiny—and PR pros should fight to be included in the process
that creates them.